[-empyre-] Fwd: Empyre in July

[magnus at ditch.org.uk]

I am glad to introduce Michel Bauwens' first contribution for the week -
Best wishes, Magnus :

//

  I'm not much of an art expert but rather the kind of person that gets
excited about ideas and visions, but those ideas and visions are very much
alive and present in my mind .. So I thought that I'd focus my first
contribution on political aspects of our work at the p2p foundation. I will
comment later more specifically about piracy and its political-cultural
aspects. (well actually, after finishing this piece, it turns out I went in
personal confession mode, something I have actually never done outside this
forum)


 I hope people won't feel to uncomfortable with the personal background,
which is part of the story.


 It all begin a first time about 14 years ago, when I had a 'annus
horribilis' that really shook me to the core, I think we're talking about
the period 1996-97. It was a year where my father died, my mother got
diagnosed with Alzheimer, the love of my life broke up, I discovered some of
my business associates had a criminal background and had gone off with the
business funds; a movie I had been working on for three years, TechnoCalyps,
got stalled because of a fight between the producer and the director,
cutting off my escape from the corporate world; and I had a major row with
my intellectual guru of the time, Ken Wilber (integral theory). Of course,
serious health consequences also ensued. It basically totally floored me and
constituted my mid-life crisis. For me this is the time when you realize
your life is half over, and you realize that if you don't realize the dreams
and ideals of your youth, you will die cynical and disappointed. It was now
or never.


 The way I saw it then, was that the major issue for me had been that I had
given up on my ideals for the creation of a better world, as corny as this
may sound. It seemed to me that the passionate energy involved in that
desire, had been buried and was working against me, and that if I wanted to
discover from the combined crisis, I had to reconnect with this source of
energy. It was also the time when I became increasingly convinced that all
the objective indicators of human and social life, were turning negative,
and that our civilisational model was hitting a wall.


 The first thing question then was really, but how do we change this overall
situation as a single individual, how do we engage without actually making
the situation worse.


 As a youth, I had been a radical leftist, active within the rather
sectarian Militant tendency, then rather well-known in the UK. But this
engagement had led nowhere, was followed by the neoliberal counterrevolution
of the 80s, and had personally exhausted me. Since I could not change the
world, I had concluded, by the time I was 23 and after seven years of
intense engagement, the only option was to change my 'self'. The problem
though was that I had emotionally broken with that type of life, and with
Marxism, but had not really gone through a rational process of thinking
through what was wrong with it, I had rather rejected it as a whole, even
ritually burning a suitcase full of my books (yes, I know, a crying shame!).
Instead, I began a personal exploration that brought me in touch with, more
or less in sequence, the human potential techniques, eastern spiritual
practices and theories, the western esoteric traditions (been a rosicrucian,
a mason, a templar, had a alchemy teacher and drew Tarot cards), ending with
a 3 year period of self-study of western philosophy by the time I was 30.
This may seem pretty fast, but I think I have a capacity of absorption of
ideas and concepts that is probably beyond the average. My method was really
participant observation, going into a movement fully and without
reservation, practice the injunctions, see what it did with the bodymind and
my personality structure, and when I thought I had absorbed its most
important core elements, move on. By my thirties then, feeling substantially
transformed, I embarked on my business career, not because of a love of the
corporate world, but because I felt it was an area of cultural dynamism, in
which I could 'create' something and make something of my life. That was the
period then that ended with that big personal crisis.


 In any case, as I decide to go back to my roots and my youthful engagement,
I felt the need to study Marx again, but at the same time, I dreaded the
effort of going through not only the primary texts, but also the major
interpretations of where it had gone wrong. Luckily then, I stumbled upon
Negri's Empire 
 It's not that I cannot find fault with the approach, but
here it seemed to me was at least a work with a sweeping vision, a positive
view of the potential for change, and that had gone through a critique of
Marx 



 It is after this reading experience, which took me about three months of
internal struggles, that I decided to follow a basic intuition: that the
isomorphism of peer to peer, which I literarally saw emerging everywhere,
this great horizontalisation of human relationships through massive
self-aggregation around common value and affinities, was te lever of change
I had been looking for. That civil society had now become productive, and
was no longer a derivative of the value creation of the corporate world, but
rather the other way around, that social cooperation was becoming
increasingly primary, and that the older vertical institution were living
increasingly 'off' this new productivity.


 I decided by the end of 2002, that I had to finally quit the corporate
world, take a 90% pay cut (actually 100% at first), and try to develop this
basic intuition in all its consequences. With hindsight, the great crisis of
1996-97, when all had gone wrong that could go wrong, had been a true 'born
again' moment in my life, which after a period of restoration and
maturation, led to the decision to create an autonomous life around a core
belief and intuition. Lucky for me, I had by then met my new thai wife, a
continual source of domestic happiness, and when I asked her if she'd agree
with moving back to her home country, answered: don't worry, we will always
have food and shelter, what else do we need 
 This was the final go ahead, I
decided to quit my job by October 2002, taking my wife, new son, my mother
with Alzheimer, to Thailand.


 I took a two year sabbatical, consisting of six months of travel within
Europe, six months of studying Thai history and culture at the local
university and one year of full-time reading, focusing on the long haul of
history and in particular the phase transition at the end of the Roman
Empire .. (and finally getting to read the postmodern authors I had always
missed out on). In 2005, I wrote my first manuscript on peer to peer; by
2006, I started the online ecology, gradually introducing the wiki, the
blog, the social bookmarking 
 Somehow, though it is not at all financially
sustainable, it seems to have been the good decision, and as the world
continued to evolve, p2p emerged as more than a marginal effect, people were
slowly attracted to the basic ideas of the p2p foundation, and I could build
a community of some type, and this year, a cooperative to achieve some type
of sustainable livelyhood for the precarious researchers which hover around
us 
 At home, the experience of my thai extented family, the
magical-mythical forms of consciousness overlayered with a whiff of
postmodern capitalism, the 19 cats, 3 dogs, porcupine, birds and fish, the
occasional visting monkey ; together with the online network, the
equipotential cooperation and the lecture tours, give me a quite
extraordinary relational wealth, not bad for a single child of two orphan
parents 
 In some way, I feel like a 'political artist', not that I'm
particularly creative culturally and artistically, but I have to live, from
my 'creations', sell my performances, and go through the precarity that is
the lot of most artists and creators ..


 Anyway, what then, is the p2p foundation, it is really nothing else than
the ambitious attempt to create a new vehicle for the world revolution, not
the only one, but hopefully one that can be a positive factor; a pluralist
organisation, that does not know the 'answers' but facilitates the ongoing
dialogue around those answers, bringing very varied sorts of people together

 Precisely because of my convoluted past, having touched many different
ideological and lifeworlds, I can bring together on the same table, a
'zionic' social economy mormon, a conservative catholic distributist, a deep
ecological permaculturist, a unrepentent marxist, a anti-capitalist 'freed
market' mutualist, and many other strange manifestations of the human desire
for change. Rather than looking for universal answers, we are looking for
commonality of desire. But this ongoing effort is helped by the 'objective'
changes in society, and by the new class realities of knowledge workers.


 I cannot help but be truly convinced that “p2p” is the chaotic attractor
that we need to reformulate the emancipatory vision that is appropriate for
the 21st century. Technology is NOT the change, but it enables struggling
creative minorities to find new ways to outsmart the forces that are against
emancipation and that are presently literally and physically, destroying our
biosphere. As the system will increasingly go in crisis mode, these
struggling minorities will be joined by the desperate majorities, who turn
to p2p solutions not out of any idealism, but as the necessary tool for
resilience and survival. The key question then becomes, how do create a
synergy between the new p2p thinking, the construction of new ways of life,
and the mass mobilisations that are the inevitable result of the breaking of
the social contracts on which capitalist life was based until now?

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

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